The Evolution of Important Google Search Algorithm Updates (Infographic)

Over the past few years, Google’s prime focus lies on eliminating spam from their search results, flushing worthless content with their revolutionary algorithm updates. But 2015 was more about Mobilegeddon and RankBrain, two progressively gentler updates whose impacts have been discussed in depth in the following infographic.

That said, Mobilegeddon and RankBrain weren’t the only updates Google made last year. There have been a few unnamed and unacknowledged updates as well. For example, there were significant ranking changes in eCommerce sites for branded and heavy-traffic keywords on Feb. 4, 2015.

Some mobile-related and usability shifts were also noticed. Soon after this, we saw one of the most talked-about update of the year -- Mobilegeddon, although it turned out to be a false alarm, as its impacts were hardly noticeable.

There has been certain quality updates as well, which impacted low-quality news snippets, how-to content and clickbait sites. In the later part of the year came another major update from Google -- RankBrain.

This artificial intelligence system helped Google to sort through the search results. Although the search giant has been using this machine-learning AI system for a past few months to deliver the most relevant search results for a particular query, Bloomberg first broke the news on Oct. 26, 2015.

The last update from Google was again unconfirmed. Nevertheless, Phantom 3 was a significant update with its focus on Panda-like content quality. The good news is that this algo update wasn’t focused on links.

While some of these updates were permanently integrated into Google’s search algorithm, the search giant has just rolled back a few of the changes and is planning to roll out some more over an extended duration.